So forgetting for a moment that Malkin's attack on KJ is politically motivated, the fact remains that he's tainted with all sorts of financial and sexual improprieties, and now Rhee is out there, safe as houses (she hopes) from her own scandal in DC, and we're asked to believe that any problems she had in Washington are utterly attributable to some nameless, faceless mob that she is most decidedly NOT part of.

How is it that she's not? Well, she's anti-union, for starters, which in some people's books means she's OKAY!!! Unions, bad. Cheating scandals, good!!! As long as we're clear, we can proceed.

And what shall we say? Well, no one cares whether an anonymous troll welcomes or is warmed by Guy Brandenburg's attempts to shed light on the darkness of Michelle's Rhee's corrupt tenure in DC. Nor does anyone need such a person's permission to to do. Nor do his standards of investigation (standards which he clearly does NOT apply to himself, as is evident by his attempts to defend the indefensible and justify Rhee's greed, self-aggrandizement, and corruption as everyone's fault except for her own), hold any sway with Guy, me, or lots of other folks who aren't about to turn a blind eye to cheating, regardless of who is responsible, regardless of what political party is involved, or anything else except whether there's something clearly rotten in Denmark.

Furthermore, my own sharp and frequent criticisms of the American school system don't depend on the approval of such anonymous (and on my view, cowardly) people. Nor do they need be grounded in the same selectively blind theories that inform such people's very questionable and over-general criticisms. My deepest concerns are with the overarching philosophy of education, attitudes towards children, and vision of what the aims of public education are and should be. It is there that our public schools fail to provide a sound education and pretty much always have. But the remedy is most decidedly nothing like what we generally hear from the right-wing, "libertarian" or neo-liberal profiteers and corporatists, the ones I call "educational deformers." The answers to problems that are endemic in the very consciousness of the nation, in its underlying religious and philosophical traditions that are anti-child, anti-intellectual, philistine, and crass (while at the same time only too! happy to go along with whatever the ruling elite has to say is "good for the nation," even when it's glaringly obvious that by "the nation" they mean themselves and those they feel are sufficiently like them to deserve reward), are not going to come from those same people who helped promote education as the production of clones and drones. It can't come from those who profit most from mediocrity, conformity, and dullness.

The so-called "Education Mafia" is not the real problem. It is merely the face of the problem, a symptom of the problem, while the real perpetrators sit well-behind the scenes, raking in profits and staying protected from the accountability they have the gall to call for from others. And now, as that doesn't sate their lust for money, they have decided to destroy the system they helped create and build a new one in which the money goes directly to them, cutting out any inconvenient middle (wo)men whom they feel are getting a bit too much pie for their efforts.

It's a brilliant scam, set into motion in the Reagan Administration, fueled by a bogus document called A Nation At Risk, in which the folks who brought you the problem in the first place now offer to solve it, if you just trust them and turn public education over to their direct control. Never mind that their models don't even work in their ostensible areas of expertise or that the research within education suggests strongly that these models will fail even more dramatically in that arena - just trust them, because educators have this union, and unions are all corrupt, and, well, trust them.

Meanwhile, what they offer is even blander, more mindless, and more depressing than what has already been served up for the last 12 decades or so in public schools.

I could continue, but I'll close for now with this:

"It has been customary for fathers to pass on to their sons the creeds and customs which their own fathers had passed on to them. Ancestors have been worshiped and the Old Man has been honored from time immemorial. Education has been chiefly a matter of compelling the child to conform to the ways of his elders. The student has been taught answers, not questions. At least, when questions have been taught, the answers have been given in the back of the book. In the main, knowledge has been given the student, but not a method for adding to it or revising it -- except the method of authority, of going to the book, of asking the Old Man. The chief aim of education has been to make of the child another Old Man, to pour the new wines of possibility into the old bottles of tradition. Wendell Johnson, " PEOPLE IN QUANDARIES, 1946, pp. 24-25.

Dr. Wendell Johnson (April 16, 1906 ? August 29, 1965) was an American psychologist, actor and author and was a proponent of General Semantics (or GS).